Testing out the integration of Flowgram into Wordpress.

Tagged with: flowgram
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Here’s me asking for help…

I found out the other day that my school bought an 8GB iPod Touch a few months ago. They had bought it with the intention of seeing whether this kind of wireless, handheld device had any serious implications for education. They’ve not seen any yet, so they gave it to me to try.

I’m sure there are loads of posts about this already, but I’d love to hear the best ways to use this in a classroom setting, my classroom to be specific.

So what do you think? How does this bad boy fit into a classroom routine?

NB: I’m not going to jailbreak it, so let’s stick with stuff that’s on the level.

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Hello faithful readers.

According to feedburner there are roughly 600 of you signed up to receive this blog’s updates via RSS. I don’t have a line on how many of you are subscribed to the normal RSS feed outside of feedburner.

Either way, if you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around. I don’t think what’s offered here is of much value, since I don’t put any time into blogging.

Fair warning, given my summer grad school schedule, this will likely remain a link blog for a few more months. Heck, it may never turn into more. Who knows?

If you’re ok with that, stay subscribed. If not, no hard feelings. I might live blog something at NECC if I go, but no promises.

Chris

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I caught this from Doug Johnson and then linked over to Will Richardson’s entry. This is interesting!

I like Doug’s layout, and I’m going to go one further by listing the app, whether it’s open source, and on what platform I use it, since I use so many different platforms in a day…I think this is supposed to be web apps, but I’m listing everything I can think of, just for fun.

I’ve added links where possible for what it’s worth. Some of the links might not be right, as I’ve done this more off the top of my head than anything.

Daily

TheBlast.fm (Internet radio, this is the first thing I turn on every day when I get to work) - through iTunes on PC and Mac, through VLC on Linux

Mozilla Firefox - latest version on all platforms. This is my web browser of choice. The really crucial plugin is Foxmarks for bookmark synching.

Gmail - through Firefox.

Bloglines - the classic version. I can’t get a grip on the beta and don’t like Google Reader as much. I still check my friends’ shared items in GR though.

Twitter - I usually have the previous two tabs as well as this one open all day and refresh periodically.

Novell Groupwise 7.0 - School email, on the PC I use the work installed version and at home the web version although I have a rule that forwards each message to Gmail for my own backup. It stays open all the time while I am at work and I strive to empty the inbox when I check it.

Papers - Mac only, this has become my defacto pdf management tool for research.

Foldershare - Mac and PC only, I use this to synchronize some folders between four machines.

Moodle - for use with my students.

Blackboard - for graduate school use.

Weekly

iTunes - for iPod synching. Mac only for synching, Windows for podcast management at work so I’ll have TED talks and Pogue videos to watch at lunch time.

FileZilla - open source and all platforms, this is by far my favorite FTP application, been using it for years. So thrilled to see a Mac version that works nicely with Leopard.

Wordpress - handles all my blogs, from this one to TeachJeffSpanish.com to NextGenTeachers.com.

Google Calendar - I really just use this to keep track of myself and a few others, can’t convince my wife to consolidate the paper calendar to here.

Google Reader - periodically I check in to see what you’ve shared.

Jott - I constantly do Jotts to myself to help me remember to do certain things. I’ve got a rule set up in Gmail to flag it TO DO.

Colloquy - Mac IRC client that I use to keep track of edublogosphere.com.

Cisco VPN Client - to connect to University VPN system

NoodleTools - My current system for organizing bibliographies for grad school - web based. Since I’ve moved to Papers I’ll probably stop using Noodletools although it’s been wonderfully helpful over the last year. I might keep the subscription just because they’ve been so good.

Monthly or just Occasionally

Facebook - I log in periodically hoping the revelation will strike me as to why the heck I need it. So far, nothing, except that a Ph.D. I respect from across the country has accepted my friend request. Not sure what that means…

Audacity - for audio editing - open source and cross platform

KomPozer - open source and cross platform, based on Nvu, for HTML editing when I don’t feel like firing up VMWare Fusion and Windows XP to use…

Dreamweaver - for grad school course that requires it’s use.

PbWiki - by far my preferred wiki.

AuthorPoint Lite - this was given out by the WizIQ folks but I use it to prep my slideshows for my Moodle install. I can’t use Slideshare anymore so I go this route.

Google Maps - for driving directions around town and otherwise.

That’s what I can think of for now, I might come back and add more as time progresses, but for now it is time to smack the publish button…

Chris

Tagged with: appsiusememe • pbwiki • toomanytoadd • wordpress
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I’ve been having a few issues recently that I’ve been able to fix in the wee hours of the morning and I wanted to share the fixes with you in case you’re having any of these problems.

1. FoxMarks wouldn’t synchronize when I upgraded to FoxMarks 2.0.34.

Solution: I had to upgrade to 2.0.36 and then change the auto proxy settings for Firefox. It had to be set to Direct Internet connection. I also had to find the download by going to FoxMarks.com and seeing the link to the wiki.

2. Wordpress quit sending comment notifications following upgrade to 2.3.1. I upgraded to 2.3.2.

Solution: It turns out that I had to enable a forwarding email address in the form of wordpress @ myblogaddress.com and forward it on to my gmail acccount. There was a change in there somewhere that caused this.

Maybe this doesn’t affect you, but maybe it does. If this helps, well, good.

Chris

Tagged with: bugfixes • foxmarks • wordpress
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I have a pretty nice home office setup. I’ve got a 20″ iMac and a 19″ LCD Dell 1905FPS LCD monitor sitting next to it. It’s a really nice monitor and accepts two inputs. On the analog side, I’ve got my Windows XP box which hardly ever gets turned on any more. On the DVI side I’ve got my iMac plugged in as a second monitor. I used to leave the LCD off most of the time until yesterday when I got some revelation that I could actually put it to use.

Here’s what it looks like now…

Useful, eh? Here’s how I did it..

I first heard about GeekTool some time ago from Lifehacker. I remember having tried to get it to work once before but failing. My issues, I was sure, so I attacked it again. Also credit Lifehacker for the script to embed Skype contacts you’ll see below..

Once Geektool was installed, I copied and pasted the shell command as per Lifehacker’s suggestions and it popped right up. I configured the script a bit for my liking and it was good to go!

I had also thought about a plain text todo list which I’ve heard from a few folks is a good idea. I had issues making it work with TextEdit, though, since it always tried to save as an .rtf file. Through a few twitter direct messages, I learned that you can force a plain text file by adding .txt to the file name.

It still didn’t work.

Turns out I had to set the encoding as shown below…this only worked for me once I created a file in Windows notepad.exe and copied it over. I couldn’t make this work solely on the Mac side.

Ok then, once I did this, I set the Geektool up to see the file. To monitor your machine’s console log, it defaults to seeing it like this…

I did this and it worked nicely when looking at my plain text todo list. The only trouble is when I changed the text file it didn’t change on the screen. That’s no good. I had to log off and log back on for GeekTool to recognize the change. That’s not cool.

I went searching and stumbled across this thread which lead me to this post. Eureka!

Once I right clicked, went to Open With, and used Firefox, I got the local URL for my todo list! I pasted that along with a curl command, set the refresh to 30 seconds and voila!

The command looks like this –> curl file:///Users/username/Desktop/todo.txt and it automatically refreshes at the interval selected.

So now I had my solution and a darned useful second monitor! I’ve still got plenty of screen real estate left to delegate to other stuff if needed, and will do that on an as-needed basis.

Here’s what my second monitor looks like now, click for a larger version with skitch’ed details.

As you can see, I’m leaving Colloquy open on the edublogosphere IRC channel (irc.edublogosphere.com and channel #edublogosphere) just in case anyone stops by.

Any other GeekTool’ers out there that can suggest a cool uptime command or anything else I can be doing with GeekTool to be even geekier? Did you set this up yourself? Shout out in the comments!

Tagged with: colloquy • edublogosphere • geektook • lifehacker • multiple monitors • skype
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I was one of the first people to order an OX when they first went on sale. I ordered it roughly 30 minutes after the site went live.

So where’s my XO? Uh, I mean where’s my five year-old daughter’s learning tool?

I came across a post this morning from OLPC news stating that it doesn’t necessarily matter when you bought it, as folks from week 2 are already getting them. So I’m getting anxious.

That post linked to a discussion board thread saying we should call FedEx to see if a package is en route. I didn’t think it would work, but I gave it a shot. Lo and behold, my her XO is slated to arrive on December 18! Yay!

(pic credit to the guy who got his XO stolen in transit) 

Tagged with: g1g1 xo laptop.org olpc olpcnews
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I was over at Miguel’s blog reading about empanadas when I decided to leave a comment. I’ve always been a bit frustrated about Miguel’s use of Haloscan, but I survive.

Anyway, as I was leaving a comment about his empanada recipe I noticed the contextual ads above. Sheesh. I’m not losing weight eating empanadas!

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A few days ago I was looking through my processes window here at work on the Windows machine I use. It runs Windows XP Pro, for what that’s worth. I saw this…

Since I was dealing with a slightly sluggish system of late, I decided to Google this process to find out what the heck it was.

Do the search yourself and see what you think.

Do you think what I thought? A trojan! I was worried about this because I am super careful and consider myself darn savvy about where to click and where not to. I immediately ran my Trend Micro OfficeScan client as well as Windows Defender. Didn’t pick up a thing.

According to one link, the trojan is totally memory resident so scans won’t detect it. Uh, ok.

I found a removal tool, which crashed each time I ran it. Did I really have it and the trojan was knocking out the removal tool? Yikes!

I managed to find the log file generated by the removal tool and it said my ssnetlib.dll was not vulnerable. It shouldn’t be, I am up to date with all my Microsoft Updates.

So what’s the problem, then? I’ve got a process taking up 50 megs (sometimes way more) and I don’t know why. As a side note, I am familiar with the plain jane SQL Server and I have not ever installed it here. I don’t have any reason to.

After a few hours of quitting it and having it restart itself (the process, that is) I happened on a link that mentioned Pinnacle. Well, after seeing Dean Shareski’s green screen presentation for the Flat Classroom Project, I grabbed a copy of Pinnacle Studio 10 with the green screen (couldn’t find v. 11 locally) and installed it.

On a whim, I checked the Add/Remove Programs section and lo and behold…

I promptly removed it and went on about my day with a speedier system. This post is intended to hit the search results rankings so that others can see the sqlserver.exe is not always a trojan.

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So since I made a Voicethread with my little girl today I wanted to embed it. That turned out to be hard to do. Here is how I got it to work…

1. I searched Google.

2. I found the Wordpress plugin on this forum page and installed it.

3. Now I have this neat little tab below my post editing.

And all I have to do is paste in the code it gives and presto!

Darn that was easy. Nice plugin, Voicethread!

You have to sign in to Voicethread before you see the screen above, which means you can only embed the voicethreads you create, or does it?

Using the syntax it offers, you can embed any voicethread, just by using the number of the thread itself. For example, the wordpress plugin tutorial address bar looks like this…

So if I use the syntax it offers (which looks like voicethread b=xxxx) surrounded by brackets, I can embed any voicethread.

Here is the voicethread wordpress plugin tutorial…

All I’ll do is replace xxxx with 4643.

Voila! An embedded voicethread that I didn’t create.

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